


The Road Winds On

by sadlikeknives



Category: Fast & Furious 6 (2013), Furious 7 (2015), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
Genre: Ensemble Cast, Everybody Lives, F/M, Fix-It, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-02 09:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5242487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadlikeknives/pseuds/sadlikeknives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Attendance at Sunday barbecue was, as Gisele understood it, mandatory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Road Winds On

**Author's Note:**

  * For [natacup82](https://archiveofourown.org/users/natacup82/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, natacup82! I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it!
> 
> Many thanks to my lovely beta, who knows who she is!

Attendance at Sunday barbecue was, as Gisele understood it, mandatory. Which was fine by her. She never turned down free barbecue. Han asked if they could bring anything, and Dom, who had actually eaten Han's cooking at some point, apparently didn't want to risk Gisele's, because he said no. That was a sensible choice on his part, and one for which Gisele commended him greatly; she and Han survived on takeout and the kindness of others for a reason. They stopped by a bakery and picked up a cake on the way, anyway, since neither of them knew whether Sunday barbecue traditionally included dessert, and they had some news to break that could use sweetening. Han carried the cake, of course. Gisele's left leg was still in a brace from hip to ankle; her crutches were enough to be dealing with.

Dom took one look at the cake and said, "You're leaving."

"That, too," Han said, and clapped him on the shoulder. Gisele considered telling him that they'd be back, eventually, but there was no reason to tell the man something he already knew.

The only one who asked questions was Mia, who was worried about Gisele's physical therapy, and Gisele rolled her eyes and told her, "If we stay in one place for as long as that's going to take we'd both go crazy," and Mia didn't argue with her any more. A few years ago, Gisele could have said the same thing, just the pronouns would have been singular, and that change was what made her take a deep breath and announce, "Han and I got married," rather than chickening out of it for another hour or two.

Once the shouting, most of which was variations on 'and where the fuck were we when this happened?' died down, Han explained, "We just went to the courthouse on Friday and did it. So we could claim each other as next of kin next time one of us lands in the hospital, more than anything. It doesn't change anything, really." That was true. They both knew they were in this for the long haul before. A piece of paper couldn't change anything about that.

Tej wanted to know, "So are you Mrs. Seoul-Oh now? Gonna be a Jedi?"

"Absolutely not." She had assumed it was a rather thin alias at first, then made fun of Han mercilessly when she found out he'd changed his name legally when he turned eighteen. She refused to open herself up to his turning the tables.

"Man, y'all are no fun," Roman groused, "didn't even get to go to a wedding, put my suit on or nothin'. And now Gisele’s not even gonna be a Jedi, man."

"You got to come to the reception," Brian teased, and Roman threw a chip at him. "What?" Brian asks. "We got cake and everything! Open bar, too.”

“It’s not an open bar,” Dom protested, and Brian pointed his Corona bottle at him.

“We’re gonna drink all your beer,” he promised.

“You do that anyway, O’Conner!”

Later, when half of them were cleaning up and the other half were sitting around drinking more Coronas to keep Brian a man of his word, Dom sat down across from Gisele and told her this story about his father's Sunday barbecues and the requirement for entry, once upon a time in a past that might as well have been a fairy tale., with how far it was removed from the man Dom had become. When he finished, Gisele told him, "I'm Jewish." She wasn't very good at it, it was true, but still.

"You know, I think I knew that," Dom said, wry and light, and then he shrugged those big shoulders of his and said, "Ah, I ain't as picky as my dad." His voice went heavy and dark, even more gravelly than usual, as he added, "Don't have room to be." Gisele was not the right person to offer reassurances on that front—hell, none of them were—so she didn't try, and after a moment Dom shook his head a little and asked, back to normal, "So where are you going on the honeymoon?"

She rolled her eyes and protested, "It’s not a honeymoon." Dom just looked at her, waiting her out. "I don't know," she admitted. "We haven't really decided where we're going yet. Just...need to go." She and Han were always more about the journey than the destination. She turned to look through the open back door at him, helping Mia and Roman with the dishes as the stranger wearing the face of the woman Dom loved looked anxiously on, unsure of how to insert herself into the tableau. Gisele felt for her—even Hobbs, standoffish and uptight as he was, had almost fit into the group with more ease—but before she could think on it Han seemed to sense her looking and turned, flashing a smile at her before going back to his sinkful of water. Gisele turned back to Dom and said, "Still haven't made it to Tokyo."

Dom sort of hummed, this low rumble in his chest, and said, "Well. Door’s always open for you," before getting up and going inside to try, once again, to talk to Letty.

Eventually, Han came back out and asked her, "You ready to go?" and she was. So they went.

It wasn't quite as simple as that, of course. There was another round of hugs and goodbyes and promises to stay in touch, and insistences that the Toretto-O'Conner household should keep the leftover cake, before they could leave. Their days of being able to quietly slip in and out of others' lives were truly at a close. "Are we getting old?" Gisele mused as they drive back to Han's LA place.

"Better than the alternative," Han pointed out, and Gisele didn't argue, even though there was a time, not that long ago back when she’d used singular pronouns more, she wouldn't have agreed. Or cared enough to agree.

Han had to do all the driving at first, which frustrated Gisele no end, but she just had to accept. Her leg would be out of the brace eventually, after all. They drove up the Pacific Coast Highway since it was right there begging for it, and then they kept going north because why not? Her leg came out of the brace in Anchorage, which meant they had to stay there for the first phase of physical therapy. Winter rolled in while they were there. "We have seriously miscalculated," she told Elena during one of their phone calls, "this may be our greatest mistake, right here," and the Brazilian just laughed at her from sunny Spain. They were in agreement they were going somewhere warm next, so when they sold the car and booked a flight, it was to Hawaii, where Han was kind of shit at surfing and Gisele was excellent at sitting on the beach watching Han be shit at surfing. (She knew how, but her leg was still kind of weak, and she refused to admit to it, so she just bowed out and enjoyed lying on the beach with the sun soaking her bones.)

One day, over sushi, she said, "I want to go to Italy sometime."

Han nodded thoughtfully. "Lot of good roads there, I hear."

"And also Venice. I've always wanted to see Venice.” She ate another piece of sushi before adding, “We'll have to improve your bike skills before we go."

Han smirked at her. "Or I could just hang on to you really hard."

She grinned, wolfish. "That, too." And with another goal in mind, another someday, something to dream about and meander toward, she pointed out, "Well, we're already halfway there." She didn't need to say where; they both knew she wasn't talking about Italy. Han looked thoughtful, then nodded, and that was that.

He booked the tickets the next day. When she sent out a group text to let everyone know where they were headed, she got a flood of responses like, _Holy shit,_ and, _r u srs?_ and _I wasn't sure you guys knew it was a real place you could actually go to,_ and, _Fukken rly???_ She rolled her eyes fondly at all of them and returned to the perennial problem of whether or not she liked enough of her current wardrobe well enough to check a bag (Conclusion: No.).

Tokyo was all light and noise and people, and wasn't Gisele's scene, exactly, but they weren't really here for the city, either.

The first time Han saw drifting in the flesh, his eyes lit up, and Gisele knew they were going to be here a while. So they rented a garage, somewhere big and private with places they could sleep, too, and they started modifying a car. Gisele learned the basics, because it seemed like a useful skill to have, but she still preferred her bikes. Han, though, Han was in love, and determined to master the art. It took a while. He crashed a lot at first. Gisele took videos and sent them to all of their friends. Tej sent back notes on what they should do to what to avoid the same problem on the next run, because Tej was a helper.

The head of the local racing scene was, they learned pretty quickly, a Yakuza brat named Takashi. "Calls himself DK," Han reported back after one of the meets. "For 'Drift King.'"

Gisele considered this and concluded, "That's the most teenager shit I've ever heard in my life." It surprised Han into laughter, and he rolled over in the bed and kissed her with her giggling into his mouth. "No, but when you beat him," she pressed, still snickering a little under it, as Han's mouth moved down her jaw to her neck, "is he going to go running to Daddy?"

"Uncle, I think," Han said, and, as he reached her collarbone, "Don't tell me you're scared of the Yakuza."

"Don't be silly. Just like to know what kind of spoiled brat we're dealing with."

Some of the kids from the local racing scene started hanging out at their garage, and eventually Gisele realized some of them had stopped going home. "I am not running an orphanage," she protested.

Han shrugged, popped a chip in his mouth, and said, "I think most of them have parents somewhere." She gave him a disbelieving look, he grinned, and she gave up. She knew a lost battle when she saw one. This was what she got for agreeing the place with bunk space was perfect, she supposed.

"We're coming up with a chore rotation or something," she declared. "I'm not having a bunch of teenagers freeloading on me."

"Sure thing," Han agreed, easygoing as ever.

"And the first one that calls me Mom is out on his ass," she shouted over her shoulder as she went to find a whiteboard and start making this happen.

The first time she had to yell at them to turn the music down, she really did consider throwing them all out.

(“Do you want kids?” she asked late one night in the manager’s apartment, and Han was silent beside her for long enough that she began to think she’d said the wrong thing.

Han finally replied, “Do _you_ want kids?” and she relaxed a little. He’d just been weighing his response against the fact that he wouldn’t be the one incubating anything.

“Well, right now I really don’t want teenagers.” He laughed, and she thought about it, about why she’d even asked it. She’d never thought she’d want kids. Never thought she’d live long enough, for one thing, or that she’d find someone worth having them with. Now, though… “I don’t know. Maybe. Not now.”

“Definitely not now,” Han agreed, and that was the end of that, for then.)

It came as no surprise when, as soon as Han started to get good enough to actually challenge DK (Gisele was a consummate actress, so she could say it without giggling when she had to, but she was always laughing on the inside), they were "invited" to a meeting with Uncle Kamata.

Han let Gisele do the talking, of course. "We're not interested in money," Gisele told him up front. “I’d say you can have your cut, but we’re not into anything for you to get a cut of. As soon as we are, we’ll let you know. We understand business.”

"What are you interested in, then?"

She shrugged, elegant as a cat. She knew this dance down to her bones. "A peaceful retirement." Han, mercifully, didn't give the game away by laughing his ass off like the concept of either of them being peaceful or retired warranted. She had been weighing Kamata up since they walked in, and she decided: cards on the table. If he decided to have them killed for the offense they could ghost out of Tokyo before sunset. "Look," she said. "We both know you haven't really achieved something if everyone who could challenge you has never gotten the chance. Your nephew is your heir. That's nice. He's going to do a shit job of it if you buy him everything he wants so he never has to put out the effort." She sat back, leaning against Han, and said, "And we're talking about street racing, it's not like it's anything that matters. Just the fragile egos of teenaged boys."

"It must matter to you, or you wouldn't do it."

"Oh, we don’t.”

“He has been.”

Han shrugged and leaned back, putting one arm around Gisele. “I wanted to learn to drift, and that’s part of it, but I’m not in it to win or lose. If I’m really going to race, it’s going to be for something important. I don’t need to prove I’m faster than anybody.”

Kamata looked thoughtful, and he dismissed them without even standard veiled threats. Once they were safely back in the car, Han echoed, "It's not like street racing really matters?"

"Don't ever tell any of our friends I said that," she told him sternly, "Or I'll divorce you." He had the temerity to laugh at her.

***

When the new kid finished trashing Han's car, Gisele examined her nails briefly, trying to decide if she should get a manicure, before she told Han, "You knew that was gonna happen."

"I like him," Han declared. "He has spunk." He handed Gisele his current bag of chips and went to tell the kid not to leave town, and Gisele sighed, mouthed, ‘Spunk?’ to herself, and followed. 

“We could do with a project,” he said on the way home, like the pack of teenagers already turning their garage into their own party hostel wasn’t project enough, and Gisele figured she’d better learn the kid’s name if they were going to be stuck with him.

("This is how Dom got stuck with Brian, you know," she pointed out to Han later, after Mia had apprised her of that fact, and Han scoffed.

"Sean's a nice kid, but he's not Brian."

Amen to that.)

It was probably wrong of her (but hell, Gisele had done a lot of wrong things in her life) but she started treating the Sean situation like a TV show being put on for her entertainment. She sent Elena and Brian, who enjoyed the updates the most, e-mails. The others got occasional texts, and videos of his best flubs during drift training. She only really engaged with the situation a couple of times.

"I see you," she told Neela one night at a meet. "I see what you're doing."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Neela protested, and Gisele rolled her eyes.

"Making sure you've got the strongest guy around isn't a bad strategy for being safe, but it won't make you happy. You need to decide which of them's going to do that, and if it's not either of them, drop them both." She thought the girl would probably choose Sean, at least for a while, but she needed to make that decision. Those two hotheads didn't need any more reason to be at each other's throats than they already had.

Neela shook her head. "Takashi wouldn't--"

\--like that, Gisele finished for her in her head. It was understandable to be scared of the kid, with his connections, when his uncle was her protector, but, "Takashi isn't as big and bad as he thinks he is." His uncle was, but if he was foolish enough to get involved in his nephew's love life he wasn't likely to be smart enough to remain in power much longer. He’d been smart enough to back off her and Han, so she had hope.

The other time was a little more...direct. And unplanned. She wasn't exactly proud of it and she wasn't exactly not. What happened was, Sean was working on one of the cars with Han and telling the story of how he got sent to live in Japan while Gisele flipped through a magazine and wondered whether she should try the new tires it was advertising for her bike when Sean said, "So we agreed that whoever won got the girl--" and Gisele dropped the magazine and had the kid on the floor with her arm across his throat before he could get another word out.

Sean was intimidated by her before. After, he was terrified, and she was proud of that.

Han leaned over and told Sean, when he tore his eyes away from Gisele to look at him, "That's fucked up."

“It was her idea!”

Gisele really didn’t care whose idea it was. "You cannot," she said, harsh, fierce, "win a woman in a race. A woman is not a thing. She is not a prize. She is a fucking person, who makes her own choices and her own decisions, and who you _respect_. You can't treat women like pink slips. Are we clear, Boswell?" He nodded, frantic, and she pressed, "Are we _clear_?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Gisele stood, and let Han help Sean to his feet. "I'm going out," she told him, and he nodded.

The mountain roads were pretty good on a bike, too, and she let her anger wash away under the thrill of it. She stayed out for hours that night before she went back home and crawled into bed with Han.

Between Mossad and her misbegotten time with the drug lords, Gisele had a lot of contacts. She was out shopping when she got a call one day from a guy she knew what felt like a million years ago, and he asked her, "You ever hear of a guy named Deckard Shaw?"

Gisele put the purse she’d been looking at back on the shelf and left the shop, headed for her bike, one hand going to the small of her back to make sure her gun was still where she’d put it. "Any relation to Owen Shaw?"

"His big brother. Man's some kind of British special ops ghost gone rogue, G, and the rumor is he wants a piece of your crew for taking out his brother."

"Owen Shaw fucked with us first," she insisted.

"I don't know anything about that, I'm just telling you. You might want to go to ground. I hear Big Brother Shaw's crazy as they come." He hung up.

They were in Tokyo. Tokyo, where Gisele stuck out like a sore thumb, and Han, American and Korean as he is, wouldn't ever really fit in. They were in Tokyo and they needed to go to ground, so they needed to leave. Yesterday, ideally. As Gisele thought it, she was putting her helmet on and climbing on her bike, headed to Han. She tried to call him, but it went to voicemail. Of course. The man would lose his head if it wasn’t attached.

She called Dom on her way, through the Bluetooth hookup, and once she'd gotten it out Dom said in a slow, careful voice, "Gisele...did Han send us a package recently?"

"Get out of there," she snapped. "Call the bomb squad." And then she disconnected and pushed the needle on the speedometer up a little higher.

She didn't know what went wrong at the garage until much later, that Neela had finally made her choice and that Takashi had taken it about as badly as he could have. All she knew was that Han's car blasted by her on the street with more in pursuit, and it didn't feel like a race. So she turned around and went after them, taking some of the turns so hard and tight her knee scraped pavement, her heartbeat fast but steady, fear and love sending pure adrenaline singing through her veins instead of blood.

She made up enough ground to see the crash coming but had no way to stop it, but when a big bald guy got out of the car that t-boned Han's she was also close enough to skid the bike to a halt and shoot him, feeling a flash of deja vu to a runway in Spain. She missed, but Deckard Shaw might be crazy but he wasn’t crazy enough to stick around and let her take another shot at him, which meant she had an opening to get Han out of the car before it tunned into a fireball. He was conscious, barely, and she stroked his hair and told him, "You're okay, you're okay," over and over until the ambulance arrived, the same, she had been told, as he did for her on a runway in Spain, though she had no memory of it. She remembered taking her shot, remembered thinking, _This is going to hurt,_ and, _Han_ , and the next thing she remembered was waking up in a hospital bed on the good drugs with Han holding her hand and looking like he hadn't slept in a week, because he hadn't, and Roman mid-lecture to her unconscious form on how she could have held on with one hand and fired the gun with the other. It's not like it would have been easy with her gun, but still, he had a fair point for once. It was a good thing she'd always known how to take a fall, or it could have been a lot worse than it was, at that speed, falling on concrete. She knew she was lucky.

Once Han was in surgery and she had nothing else to do but wait, she called Dom. When he asked how Han was, she hesitated, then admitted, "Worse than I was. They don't really know yet if he'll. You know."

"We're going after Shaw," Dom said, and it was a declaration of war but there was a question in it, too.

"My place is here."

"Of course," he agreed. He would have said the same thing either way she chose, she thought.

"If you really need me, call, but--"

"No, Han needs you now. You take care of him and yourself first, Gisele."

She wanted to cry. She hadn't cried in years, and she told herself she would not cry now. Not until this was done and she knew Han was going to be okay, or that he was not. Either way, she thought, she could cry then. Not now. "Dom?"

"Yeah?"

"Nail this bastard to the wall."

"You got it," he agreed, and hung up. It wasn't until later that she found out about the house; all he'd told her was that everyone was okay. The house was just a house, for all that it was also a symbol. The people were the important thing. They were her family now, and she would be damned if Deckard Shaw would take even one of them away from her.

She got only shards of the story as it happened, texts or the bits people mentioned during phone calls that were mostly meant to check in on Han ("Still unconscious," she had to report every time, or, the worst times, "Back in surgery.") At one point Tej called from Dubai, and when she asked what the hell he was doing there he told her, "Dropping perfectly good supercars out of skyscrapers, apparently. What a fucking waste." Han was going to be so mad he missed this whole thing, whatever it was.

She kept her gun ready at hand to shoot the next person to walk through the door of Han’s hospital room, if she had to, until it was over.

It ended with Dom dropping a parking garage on him and Shaw both. "Shaw's in a coma," the flying update Brian gave Gisele while he was at LAX waiting to fly to the Dominican Republic and collect Mia went, "Dom had a near death experience, we're going to have to rebuild the Charger a-fucking- _gain_ , Letty got her memory back, and Dom and Letty got married ages ago and didn't tell anybody. Mia's having kittens. Oh, and a girl. Literally, not figuratively like the kittens."

"I go on one little honeymoon to Tokyo..." Gisele said, and Brian laughed like it was funnier than it really was, like it felt good to just be able to laugh after all of the insanity, and to know that now she could shift the heat to Dom for having a wedding and not inviting anyone. At least she and Han had _told_ them.

Roman flew out to Tokyo. Gisele was aware the pickings were slim, with Dom in the hospital and the Toretto-O'Connor house a pile of rubble, but she didn't understand how they decided between Tej and Rome. Maybe they flipped a coin, she thought (when she met Ramsey, saw the way Tej looked at her, it started to make sense). No one told her he was coming, he just showed up in Han's hospital room, fresh off an eleven hour flight, and Gisele looked at him, neither of them saying anything, until her brain started firing again and she protested, "There's nothing you can do."

Roman held up the bag he had in his hand and said, "I brought food," and Gisele guessed there was something he could do after all.

When one of the nurses came to throw him out, Gisele said without thinking about it, "He's my brother."

Roman didn't miss a beat, demanding of the dubious nurse, "What, you never heard of adoption before?" and as he went on a tirade about how you'd think no one had ever seen a black Jew before, the nurse gave up and went away--

\--and Han muttered, "Oh my God, somebody shut him up."

So the nurse came back, with a lot of her friends. Han knew his name, and he knew what year it was, and he knew who the prime minister was, which was remarkable, because Gisele didn't know that. He knew who she was; he smiled up at her as best he was able and said, "Hey," and she squeezed his hand and mouthed 'hey,' back.

Once the nurses had gone and Han had slipped back into unconsciousness, Gisele realized her face was wet, and with that realization came the first sob. Roman pulled her in and wrapped his arms around her, told her, "I got you, girl," and let her break down all over him, then waited for her to pull herself back together in the circle of his strong arms.

Sean came to visit the next day, Neela on his arm, Twinkie in tow, and told Han with fierce pride that he'd defeated Takashi and claimed his title as DK. Gisele thought he thought that meant he'd avenged Han, somehow. Han told him he was proud of him; waited until he'd gone to let his head fall back and tell the ceiling, "I am too old for this teenager shit."

"Nah, it's cute," Gisele decided. She could almost envy Sean, that he still thought this was all a petty fight over bragging rights and a girl. It was probably better that he didn't know. Even if he did manage to get on the wrong side of the Yakuza, that was easier to deal with than getting on the wrong side of a mad dog like Deckard Shaw. "I don't think I was ever that young."

"I was," Roman said, a wry sort of nostalgia in his voice

Gisele could have teased that he still acted that young, but she didn't. It was part of Roman's charm, that everything mattered to him, from his reputation on up. It was refreshing, when so many of them got jaded and tired, to have his boundless enthusiasm and energy at their backs. Han reached over and took her hand, and she smiled at him. "Hey," he said. "Let's go home."

She looked at him and she thought, _I am home_ , but she knew what he meant. Roman helped her pack up—she was shipping her bike, but Han's car was a total loss. All the work they put into getting it just right, and now he was going to have to replicate it when they get home, because she had no doubt whatsoever that there was going to be a line of people wanting to learn how to drift. As soon as the doctor cleared Han, they headed back to LA. Home.

Since there wasn't currently a backyard to have a barbecue in, they went to the beach the first Sunday they were back. Gisele was talking plans for the new house with Letty (still a little bit prickly, but she thinks that was just how Letty was) when she noticed first Dom slipping away, and then Brian. "What's that about?" she asked, not entirely sure she wanted to know the answer. Way back in the day, when she'd first met them, Dom had said the tension between him and Brian was down to the fact that Brian used to date his sister, and Gisele—well, Gisele had been a little surprised when not only did the sister turn out to be real, but Brian turned out to have really dated her. The electricity between those two was insane, and she'd been halfway waiting for it to boil over one way or another ever since, to mix her metaphors.

"Brian's quitting," Letty said. "Next time something crazy happens, he won't be part of it."

Mia dropped down into the sand beside them and said, "And I'm glad, and it's the right decision, and we all know it," and Gisele agreed; Jack and the little girl on the way deserved both their parents, "but neither of them is taking it as well as they're pretending they are. You know how they are."

Gisele did know how they are. "You've gotta get Brian a day job, though."

"Oh, tell me about it, he was driving me crazy hanging around the house," she agreed, laughing. "I'm gonna need some babysitters, though." In what Gisele thought was probably the least elegant segue of her life, Mia asked, "So, are you guys sticking around for a while?"

She looked over at Han in his beach chair, arguing about something with Tej, the bruising on the side of his face still not quite faded. He was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. And she’d rather babysit Jack than a dozen teenagers any day of the week. "Yeah," she said. "I think we might be."


End file.
